Thursday, January 28, 2016

Presidential hopefuls about to head south -- Jan. 28, 2016 column

In Iowa and New
Hampshire, presidential hopefuls are battling for votes in small states that
are only slightly more diverse than this year’s Oscar nominations.

Just 3 percent of Iowans
and 1 percent of New Hampshire residents are black.

After the Iowa caucuses
Monday night and the New Hampshire primary Feb. 9, though, the candidates and
the news media will converge on states that look more like America – with
larger proportions of black and Hispanic voters – and will talk about issues
that affect more people.

Yes, the 2016 election really
is about more than ethanol.

February also is Black
History Month, a time to celebrate the achievements of African Americans,
review racial progress and set goals. Significant in any election year, discussions
about political influence will be especially relevant seven years after the
first black president took office.

African Americans voted at higher rates than whites in the 2012 general election, according to the
Census Bureau, and their votes re-elected President Barack Obama, an analysis
by the Cook Political Report found.

The crucial question for
the fall is whether Democrats, without Obama on the ballot, can again inspire African
Americans to go to the polls.

South Carolina’s
Democratic primary Feb. 27 will be the first test of Hillary Clinton’s and
Bernie Sanders’ strength among black voters in the South. Fifty-five percent of
the Democratic primary voters there are black.

Clinton, favored heavily
in the polls, wants to avoid a repeat of her 2008 debacle, when she first led
Obama in polls in South Carolina only to lose badly on primary day.

Analysts suggest that
Sanders, with his flinty Vermont demeanor and Democratic socialist tag, can’t
connect with Southerners. But he just won the support of South Carolina state
Rep. Justin T. Bamberg, who had backed Clinton.

Bamberg is black and the
lawyer for the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man who was fatally
shot by a North Charleston police officer. Bamberg said he switched his support
to Sanders after talking with him for 20 minutes on the Martin Luther King Jr.
Holiday.

Few policy differences separate
Clinton and Sanders. For example, both favor raising the minimum wage, making
college education free and expanding Medicaid.

But Clinton also proposes
a $25 billion fund to specifically help historically black colleges and
universities.

Among Republicans in
South Carolina, who will caucus Feb. 20, Donald Trump leads by Ted Cruz by
double digits. Born-again or evangelical voters are about 55 percent of the primary
vote there. Trump won an endorsement from Jerry Falwell Jr., president of
Liberty University and son of the late televangelist.

Nevada’s caucuses --Democrats
on Feb. 20 and Republicans Feb. 23 – will be the first to hear from Western and
Hispanic voters.

Then comes Super Tuesday,
March 1, when a dozen states -- including Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia -- hold
presidential contests.

In some ways, the primaries
and caucuses, important as they are in picking presidential nominees, are the
warm-up for the big fight in November.

“It’s tough to overstate
just how critical black votes have become to today’s Democratic coalition,
particularly when it comes to the Electoral College,” Amy Walter and David
Wasserman of the Cook Political Report concluded after their analysis of 2012 exit
poll data.

Blacks accounted for
Obama’s entire margin of victory in Virginia and six other states in the last
election, they said, adding, “Without these states’ 112 electoral votes, Obama
would have lost decisively.”

Race has surfaced only a
few times in the presidential campaigns so far. Candidates responded to the
murders of nine black church members by a white gunman in Charleston, S.C., and
the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds.

Several candidates stumbled
early on when, commenting on the Black Lives Matter movement, they said, “all
lives matter.” Critics saw “all lives matter” as diminishing the loss of black
lives to police violence.

Trump, who draws
predominately white crowds, insists he can win black votes. His frequent Muslim-bashing, though, works against him.
Twenty-five percent of American Muslims are black. After
he met in November with African-American ministers who reportedly advised him
to stop referring to “the blacks,” he seems to have listened.

As their campaigns head
south, all the candidates will need to be sensitive to racial issues and
language. They won’t be in Iowa and New Hampshire anymore.